Oracle Embraces Big Data
October 26, 2011
What search vendor has as many findability solutions as OpenText? Answer: Oracle.
It seems like Oracle finally peered all the way over the virtual white picket fence and caught a glance of HP’s newest splurge on big data, Vertica. Wired reported on this “keeping up with the Joneses” effect with their article, “Oracle Mimics HP with ‘Big Data’ Buy.”
Endeca brings a MDEX analytics engine with a vertical record database instead of classic tables to the table.
“The marketing materials go so far as to espouse MDEX’s value over classic relational databases — such as those offered by Oracle. This new weapon in the Oracle arsenal is designed to compete with such platforms as Hadoop — the open source distributed, number-crunching platform — and the analytics software offered by recent HP acquisition Autonomy, a Cambridge, UK-based company.”
Sounds good. Just one hitch. Endeca is one of those late 1990 search systems, not one of the whizzy NoSQL systems built to scale.
While the competition heats up, it seems that the real story may be what Oracle paid for Endeca’s customer list, its e-commerce technology, and its MBA-style sales approach.
Oracle’s Larry Ellison seems to be on to this in his recent roast of Autonomy. Of course, Autonomy is not really big data–it is multiple well-managed content processing technologies.
Although Oracle has taken pot shots at Hewlett Packard, now Oracle is replicating some of the HP organization’s strategy. HP’s entrance into big data and their latest move has been matched with Oracle’s chess moves.
Have both HP and Oracle lost sight of the fact that their spate of acquisitions may have more to do with one another than with the marketplace’s appetite to buy technology that is a wee bit old?
Megan Feil, October 26, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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